Manuel

FROM SÃO TOMÉ ISLAND

Manuel

His name is Manuel. 71 years old. Widower. Carpenter. Owner of a coffee lot at Roça Monte Café (Sao Tome and Principe) – a land from which everything springs, without asking for permission.

Manuel has a wide smile, with lines of poems. He tells a unique story of a country that has forgotten how it was when it produced coffee. He still cultivates, dries, roasts and grinds it. But life does not wear him out.

Manuel doesn’t give up. He enjoys all that the land offers him, like a blessing. A seed is wealth. A berry. A vanilla pod.

Manuel is impossible to describe in words, much less in photographs. They lack the wet weather that sticks to his skin, the smell of wet earth and freshly fried plantain, the sound of children screaming outside. Above all, they lack Manuel’s permanent laugh.

Manuel is one of the few people producing coffee in São Tomé and Príncipe.